California Women and Politics: From the Gold Rush to the Great Depression

3. “WOMAN IS EVERYWHERE THE PURIFIER”: The Politics of Temperance, 1878–1900

59 3. “WOMAN IS EVERYWHERE THE PURIFIER” The Politics of Temperance, 1878–1900 joshua paddison “Governments have forgotten the requirements of morality in the hot pursuit of emoluments of fame and fortune, until the degradation and criminal tendencies of the masses are something appalling,” complained an anonymous editorialist in the June 1, 1893, edition of the Pacific Ensign, the state newspaper of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (wctu) of California. Ostensibly condemning the proliferation of barrooms in San Francisco, the writer devoted most of her attention to a cause that, for the wctu, increasingly seemed a panacea for all of California’s ills: woman suffrage. “Woman is everywhere the purifier,” noted the editorialist , “and as she makes brighter and purer the home life, so will she elevate and cleanse the moral atmosphere of State and nation. In the crusade against wrong her hour has come.”1 The editorial—with its Protestant moral righteousness, its maternalist mix of disgust and concern for the “masses,” its characterization of women as “purifiers,” and its endorsement of woman suffrage—encapsulated the intertwined values of the wctu of California, a state branch of the largest women’s organization in the United States during the Gilded Age.2 One of the few organizations active in all parts of the country after the Civil War, the national wctu held its first nationwide convention in Cleveland in 1874. By working to stamp out drinking, wctu reformers sought to extend the feminine values of the private sphere into the public sphere. In the process, the organization used prevailing gender expectations to secure a degree of political power for women. Under the ambitious direction of Frances Willard, president of the national body, the wctu expanded its agenda far beyond temperance during the 1880s and 1890s to include the promotion of the humane treatment of prisoners , an eight-hour work day, women’s vocational education, child labor reform, kindergartens, urban boardinghouses for young women, “pure” newspapers and novels, and much more.3 After 1881 the wctu joined feminist organizations in support of woman suffrage. However, the group joshua paddison 60 assured men that it sought the ballot “for no selfish ends,” but merely to guard “the home, which has been and is woman’s divinely appointed province.”4 Willard’s motto, “Woman will bless and brighten every place she enters, and she will enter every place,” epitomized how the wctu’s wide-reaching activism both sprang from and helped change traditional conceptions of femininity.5 More than any other group, the wctu helped convert ordinary American women to the suffrage cause by insisting that a woman’s social responsibility did not stop when she exited her home or church. In the words of Dorcas J. Spencer, a longtime officer of the wctu of California: “The temperance cause has created a thirst for franchise that will not be appeased without it.”6 Following the example of Willard, the state wctu strove to end the sale and consumption of alcohol in California and to enact a wide set of political and social reforms. Under the twin banners of domesticity and purity, the wctu endeavored to give “poor, neglected, debased politics a good mothering” and to improve society by making the world “more homelike .”7 For its overwhelmingly white, middle-class, Protestant membership , the wctu of California provided opportunities for personal growth and organized political action. The California women of the wctu, who increasingly worked for suffrage in the 1880s and 1890s, paradoxically expanded their power beyond the private sphere by championing the feminine values that had helped confine women to that sphere throughout the nineteenth century. As their vision of “womanly” benevolence became more and more aggressive, wctu leaders at times embraced nativism, racism, and religious bigotry. Ultimately, temperance activism helped transform popular notions of middle-class white femininity, paving the way for women’s suffrage and Prohibition in the twentieth century. Themostpopularandpersistentreformmovementinnineteenth-century America, temperance attracted thousands of California men and women of various socioeconomic classes. The Gold Rush made California famous for its unruly insobriety, a reputation supported by both anecdotal and statistical evidence.8 A series of temperance organizations emerged after 1849 to combat California’s frontier bibulousness. The Order of the Sons of Temperance, a secret fraternal organization with strong ties to evangelical Protestant congregations, managed to put a prohibitory “Maine law” on the California ballot in 1855.9 The measure lost, but the surprisingly “woman...